On the night of November 8, 1964, five years before her death at age forty-seven from an “incautious self-overdosage” of sleeping pills, Judy Garland costarred with Liza Minnelli in a concert at the London Palladium. It had been a difficult year for Garland, to put it mildly. On January 22 The Judy Garland Show was canceled after only one season, and on February 8 she was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital after being found on the floor with cuts on her face. In March she was sued by a hotel for an unpaid bill dating back to 1959, and in April she was charged $69,000 in legal fees for renovations to her house on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood, California. Her agent David Begelman, with whom she was having an affair, was embezzling from her, and she was divorcing her third husband, Sidney Luft, while fighting for custody of her two younger children, Lorna and Joey. “Sid Luft is an animal,” she said in tape-recorded notes toward an autobiography she did not write.…